


Five Transformations

by AstroGirl



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Gen, transformations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-18
Updated: 2014-02-18
Packaged: 2018-01-12 22:00:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1202125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstroGirl/pseuds/AstroGirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five canonical transformations, from the inside.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Transformations

**Author's Note:**

> Five related drabbles, written for Trope Bingo for the prompt "transformations." Contains spoilers through the middle of season 3.

1\. Boy

We all know what we really are, what we're like inside. It's only the world that forces us to be something different. To pretend to be what we're not. Pretending should be a game, not a necessity. Necessity takes all the fun out of it.

But you can have what you want here. You can be what you are. _He_ can, anyway. Between one breath and the next, he is young again, as young as he's always been inside, and there are no responsibilities, no limitations. He is _Peter Pan_. His youth is his plaything, and it will be, forever.

2\. Beast

He is changing, a little more each day. His skin grows tough and glitters like something valuable. His eyes are dark and strange. People don't want to meet his gaze. They are frightened of his smile.

He feels power growing, warm in his veins. He belongs only to it, and it answers only to him. Whatever Zoso might have thought, he regards this as a fair and welcome exchange.

If only Baelfire would understand that these alterations exist only to serve the one thing that remains constant: Rumplestiltskin's love could not protect him properly. But surely the Dark One's can.

3\. Cricket

Humanity lifts from him like a burden. The body he wears now is light and nimble. It has never been weighed down by guilt or grief. Those things aren't gone; he remembers them all. His history is still part of him, his promises still binding. But he feels _new_. He feels like a creature whose nature is to fly. He feels as if all the unwanted parts of him have fallen away, and what is left of him is clean.

Jiminy looks at humans from the outside now, and he loves them. But he never wants to be one again.

4\. Wolf

She transforms, and this is what it's like: It's red, and wild, and free. It's hunger and hunting, the chase and the kill. And this is the secret: She can be these things and still be _her_. She can hunger and be in control. Can love the hunt and the kill, and love her friends. Can be wild and free and still be Red. This is the only thing her kind needs to know. The hardest thing to accept, and the easiest thing to be.

Seamlessly she slides from woman to wolf, losing nothing in the process but her cloak.

5\. Rat

He is Smee. He's been Smee for three hundred years, stayed Smee even when forcibly projected over the town line. So, he's now also a rat. So what? He's been called that before. Probably with good reason, being small and bustling and good at sniffing out interesting tidbits. So it's more literal now. It could be worse. He could be dead. He seriously thought he was _about_ to be dead. But he's a survivor, is Smee. And already, he's starting to think he rather likes the whiskers.

You can adapt to anything, if you approach it with the right attitude.


End file.
